Hay guys, today I’m going back to my favorite bullet-hell shooters and looking at what made them fun. I’d like to hear what your favorite shooters are and why.

Here’s some of my personal highlights, which I hope to learn from:

Dodonpachi: Explosions and massive enemies everywhere. Extremely energetic art and music style.
Ikaruga: Amazing level design and scoring system that takes advantage of the game mechanics.
Touhou: Pretty bullet patterns from the bosses, and good range of difficulty levels.
Bangai-O HD: Rewards you for flying into very dangerous situations. Let’s YOU spam the bullets too.
Geometry Wars Evolved²: So colorful and chaotic that it takes skill just to see what’s going on.
Jamestown: Supports widescreen and 4 players, unlike most vertical shmups that are ported from the arcade.

In my opinion, Bullet Heaven 1’s best features were:
• Pretty, glowing bullet patterns.
• Quite casual and easy to get into for noobs to the genre.
• Cute art style that’s tied into the EBF games.

Am I right?
Because that’s probably what I’m going to concentrate on for the sequel.

Bullet Heaven 2 will have 3 difficulty settings!

The levels will be exactly the same, but the foes will have more intense bullet patterns on higher difficulties. You can’t see it in the picture, but on hard and hell, the foes also explode into bullets when killed, making rushing through stages very dangerous.

I’ll also stick in some custom difficulty settings, like the cheats in Bullet Heaven 1.
Some ideas include…

Handicaps:
• Play with one life! (default will be 3)
• Speed up the game!
• Pacifist mode! (Can’t shoot.)

Cheats:
• Play with 5 lives!
• Slow down the game!
• Foes have less life!

Playing with any cheats will reduce your final score.
Handicaps will make higher scores possible (probably), for reasons I’ll explain when the scoring system is done.

Updating sprites from EBF4 for Bullet Heaven 2. Definitely a big improvement over the first game.

Unlike the previous game, Bullet Heaven 2 is using Cat Cafe technology, and should run at 60fps in HD. The aim is to release it on mobile devices first, and on the web later.

Guess what I’m working on?!